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Google and MPEG LA Reach VP8 Patent Agreement
First time accepted submitter Curupira writes "The official WebM blog announced that MPEG LA has licensed all VP8 essential patents to Google Inc., allowing the company to sublicense the described techniques it to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis." TechCrunch offers a bit more analysis.
Score one for freedom
isn't going to like this. Google watch out for a horse's head in your bed.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
TFA indicates that MS was only holding back on WebRTC (which uses VP8) because of patent concerns, so they may now move forward on it.
That seems to defy history. MS drags its feet and tries to undercut every new web tech it can. That's just MS - their strength is the desktop and they see the web and the Internet in general as a threat.
I can well believe that MS said that patents were the reason, but making random excuses for why they won't support a web tech - and then creating new ones as necessary - is just how MS operates when it comes to the web and open standards.
In some future scenario when Google stops paying the licensing fees, what happens to the (developers/users/businesses/etc) who are using/developing with VP8/9/10/*/etc. Are these entities going to now be at risk?
Pretty good timing for Renesas.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2253238/renesas-announces-low-latency-vp8-hardware-encoder
They never said it was patent free, they said that they held all the patents (and licensed them royalty free) and that it didn't infringe on any others.
What they didn't do was indemnify people using WebM from litigation. MPEG-LA said they had a portfolio of patents that covered WebM, and said that they would indemnify... for a price.
So what Google has done is to cross-license parts of their own portfolio to ensure that people can use WebM for free and with (little) threat of litigation.
While most of use want to get rid of software and process patents, that isn't going to happen in the short term. Google did a good thing here...
What do you know I wrote a novel
I would be absolutely amazed if Google can deliver a competitive codec before HEVC/H.265 becomes entrenched.
H.264's great strength is that it reaches far beyond the web.
Theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. WebM is for all practical purposes a transcode for YouTube and that in the end is simply not enough.
Closely connected, Google has proposed that ISO/MPEG standardize VP8 in its royalty-free Internet Video Coding activity. http://www.robglidden.com/2013/03/google-mpegla-vp8-mpeg-proposal/
âoeThis is a significant milestone in Googleâ(TM)s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,â said Allen Lo, Googleâ(TM)s deputy general counsel for patents. âoeWe appreciate MPEG LAâ(TM)s cooperation in making this happen.â
âoeWe are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,â said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn.
I LOLed.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
These days, if a big patent holder in a related field (e.g. MPEG-LA) says they are going to gather all their patents and attack you, then they can do serious damage regardless of what any experts might say about actual infringement.
A company deciding to license patents that it believes it hasn't infringed it pretty common-place unfortunately.
Simple: Using x264 doesn't protect, limit you from patent litigation. If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA. Google licensed it for royalty-free use by others.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Google did a good thing here...
By kicking the can further down the road? I don't think so. It only delays resolution of the matter, and in no way deters the need to abolish patents and copyright.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
MPEG-LA isn't a patent holder. They are a licensing authority
What happens is all the patent holders of various standards like h.264 got together, negotiated a fee schedule and split up the payments such that if you wanted to license everything related to h.264, you basically paid a fee per device or implementation. That licensed you all the patents you need (they're FRAND).
It's a little better than what we have in 3GPP which results in having to license patents from individual patent holders - if you need to negotiate with 10 or 20 or 50 of them, your legal feels rise substantially versus just go and paying the fixed fee.
All Google did here was negotiate with all the patent holders together through the MPEG-LA. So now as long as you paid the fee, (or in this case, it's royalty free), no patent holder in the pool can go after you for that implementation (if you didn't pay for h.264, you can be sued for that, even if the patent was granted for VP8 - it's only valid for VP8 and not for technologies related).
they will probably still fight on the issue. What happened here is the licences the technology as a stopgap measure to buy time while they fight the good fight as it were. It is still in Googles best interest to fight against software patents and copyright reform. While some will say that Google does not really support those and use their not publish their site ranking algorithm as a example I would classafy that as a trade secret rather than as a copyright or patant issue.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
.. which patents MPEG LA were claiming to be essential?
Google is already an MPEG-LA licensor so it doesn't matter (to them) if VP8 infringes on those patents.
Simple: Using x264 doesn't protect, limit you from patent litigation. If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA. Google licensed it for royalty-free use by others.
Near as I can tell, Google hasn't gone that far yet-- Google licensed it from MPEG-LA with the option of being able to offer royalty-free licenses to VP8 users. How much you'll have to pay Google for the royalty-free license, or whether Google will subsidize the cost for all VP8 users has not yet been announced, as far as I can tell from TFA.
And the scare tactics for x264 are getting a little old, don't you think?
E pluribus unum
How much you'll have to pay Google for the royalty-free license, or whether Google will subsidize the cost for all VP8 users has not yet been announced, as far as I can tell from TFA.
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding some terminology here? It seems to me that a royalty-free licence is, by definition, free as in beer. Isn't that what royalty-free means?
No, it means "not charged per use". You can be charged an upfront fee for a royalty-free license.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA
But the quality of the codec still matters. Hardware support still matters.
If H.265 delivers on its promises, distributing video at all resolutions is going to become dramatically less expensive.
It seems to me that a royalty-free licence is, by definition, free as in beer. Isn't that what royalty-free means?
No, royalty-free means free of the requirement to pay royalties, not that the license is free.
From a technical standpoint VP8 doesn't do anything significantly better than h.264, and isn't as good as h.264 in a number of ways. The only real advantage it ostensibly possessed was its licensing terms... and most people simply don't care about that.
#DeleteChrome
I'll add my own thoughts here, also posted at http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/59893.html
"After a decade of the MPEG LA saying they were coming to destroy the FOSS codec movement, with none other than the late Steve Jobs himself chiming in, today the Licensing Authority announced what we already knew.
They got nothing. There will be no Theora patent pool. There will be no VP8 patent pool. There will be no VPnext patent pool.
We knew that of course, we always did. It's just that I never, in a million years, expected them to put it in writing and walk away. The wording suggests Google paid some money to grease this along, and the agreement wording is interesting [and instructive] but make no mistake: Google won. Full stop.
This is not an unconditional win for FOSS, of course, the LA narrowed the scope of the agreement as much as they could in return for agreeing to stop being a pissy, anti-competetive brat. But this is still huge. We can work with this.
For at least the immediate future, I shall have to think some uncharacteristically nice things about the MPEG LA.*
*Apologies to Rep. Barney Frank"
The MPEG-LA license pools don't offer non-standard restricted licenses ... Google being a licensor for say the AVC pool wouldn't give them any rights for VP8.
MPEG-LA said they had a portfolio of patents that covered WebM, and said that they would indemnify... for a price.
No they didn't. What they said was we will licences Their patents for a price. There is explicitly no indemnity offered in MPEG-LA licences. Its even in the licence.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
How does this affect the Theora and Vorbis formats ..
AccountKiller
Ah! Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld
I can't decide if Google is now just craven or cowardly.
Develop a sense of humor, you fucking Philistine.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The wise guys at MPEG-LA stepped up it's game by continuously proclaiming that it would somehow find a patent to harass VP8 users with. Essentially, "nice codec you have there. It would be a real shame if anything happened to it".
It got so bad that Google finally had to pay MPEG-LA to stop threatening people so that VP8 had some chance of being used.
Your think patents are going to be reformed because of WebM? I think not. Patent reform isn't going to come though the courts it will only come when we the people can get the executive and legislative branches to reform the system.
What do you know I wrote a novel